For those of you who don’t know, the closest American state to 20,000 square miles is West Virginia, which is over 24,000. That’s huge! And that is what’s said to be the size the brutal Islamo-Nazi group Boko Haram now controls in Northern Nigeria as they create an Islamic caliphate there:
CHRISTIAN POST – With Boko Haram recently seizing its own 20,000-square-mile territory in Northern Nigeria, all signs indicate that the extremist group is working toward building a Caliphate, or Islamic government ruled by a Caliph, that could span across Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, a top Christian persecution watchdog leader warned.
While discussing the findings from the 2015 Open Doors USA World Watch List of top 50 nations where Christians are persecuted the most, during an event hosted by the Family Research Council on Thursday, Open Doors USA President, Dr. David Curry, explained the severity of the situation in Nigeria, which ranked 10th on the list, and the legitimate threat that the extremist group Boko Haram poses to Nigeria’s neighboring countries.
Curry said that in Nigeria, over 2,200 people were executed in 2014 because of their faith, which he claims could be a low estimate since there could be many more that the list could not verify.
Curry added that it is even more troubling to notice that Boko Haram is in the midst of a familiar pattern of violent extremism that helped the Islamic State extremists establish their so-called Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
Although over 9,000 Nigerians were killed and over 1.5 million were displaced as a result of Boko Haram violence in 2014, the terrorist group took its first real step toward building its own caliphate when it conquered an area the size of Belgium in the Northeastern Borno state in mid-January, capturing a few key Nigerian border towns. In one of it’s deadliest altercations yet in the town of Baga, off of the shore of Lake Chad, the group destroyed over 3,700 homes and killed as many as 2,000 people.
“Nigeria has been experiencing attacks much like the Iraqis were facing just a few years ago,” Curry explained. “You have Boko Haram, which has a very similar Al-Qaeda, Islamic State ideology, they have been making attacks, bombings, like you have seen on churches. Now all of a sudden they are beginning to take territory.
“There is a common-path pattern here,” Curry added. “First, individual attacks, then bombings, then the conquering of territory and attacking of civilian sites like army bases and these sorts of things.”
But what further leads Curry to believe that areas in bordering countries such as Niger, Chad and Cameroon could be susceptible to being seized by a potential Boko Haram caliphate is that the extremist mindset is already present in the minds of many in those countries.
“There will be an attempt at a regional caliphate in the northern part of Nigeria, which has a large Christian population to the South, but has these strong extremist presence in the North into Niger over into Cameroon in Chad,” Curry asserted. “You are going to see some major developments in this area as time goes on I believe.”
I fear he’s exactly right about the growth of this caliphate spreading into neighboring countries in Northern Africa. The next few years it’s going to be story after story of territory being conquered and people being slaughtered in these areas, all in the name of Muhammad.
The Christians in these countries are going to need a lot of prayer and a lot of support by groups like Rescue Christians. If you were going to pray for something specifically, it would be that Rescue Christians could get a strong enough presence in these countries so that they can rescue these Christians!
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